Tad M. Heppner

SMART: Semantic Malware Attribute Relevance Tagging

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With the rapid proliferation and increased sophistication of malicious software (malware), detection methods no longer rely only on manually generated signatures but have also incorporated more general approaches like Machine Learning (ML) detection. Although powerful for conviction of malicious artifacts, these methods do not produce any further information about the type of malware that has been detected. In this work, we address the information gap between ML and signature-based detection methods by introducing an ML-based tagging model that generates human interpretable semantic descriptions of malicious software (e.g. file-infector, coin-miner), and argue that for less prevalent malware campaigns these provide potentially more useful and flexible information than malware family names. For this, we first introduce a method for deriving high-level descriptions of malware files from an ensemble of vendor family names. Then we formalize the problem of malware description as a tagging problem and propose a joint embedding deep neural network architecture that can learn to characterize portable executable (PE) files based on static analysis, thus not requiring a dynamic trace to identify behaviors at deployment time. We empirically demonstrate that when evaluated against tags extracted from an ensemble of anti-virus detection names, the proposed tagging model correctly identifies more than 93.7% of eleven possible tag descriptions for a given sample, at a deployable false positive rate (FPR) of 1% per tag. Furthermore, we show that when evaluating this model against ground truth tags derived from the results of dynamic analysis, it correctly predicts 93.5% of the labels for a given sample. These results suggest that an ML tagging model can be effectively deployed alongside a detection model for malware description.

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